the tumblr of nana k.

When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.

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For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucket-loads of crap. Our analogue ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. 

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Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on the tenth...you'll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

...who went on a tirade during a luncheon speech last week at BookExpo. “Amazon also, as you know, wants to control bookselling, book buying, and even book publishing, and that is a national tragedy--James Patterson, quoted in the New York Times. 

I dislike James Patterson--the  infomercials commercials he does for his books freak me out--but I do agree with him in this regard. I was taught that competition was at the core of our economic system, so I'm not really clear on what Amazon is trying to do here. I mean...I am, but I think the mighty have farther to fall.

I find this interesting not only as a former and possibly future employee of the publishing industry, but also because I just saw this question on a job application. It was something like "Amazon is..." [ complete the sentence].

From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male. This white straight male default was of course not biased in any way by its white straight maleness—no way! Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.

--Junot Diaz, "MFA vs. POC" in The New Yorker

Oh, Junot. How do I love thee? 

At some point, I think, every writer of color who has received an MFA stops wondering if their writing is bad (it probably isn't), and starts to wonder if  they just come from the wrong ethnic group and class. 

In one class during my MFA, I went through our reading material to satisfy a suspicion--that all the work we'd been assigned to read was primarily by white male authors. So I did. And it was. Now I'm not the type of person to dismiss good writing--many of the writers in our binder were really good, solid writers--John McPhee! David Sedaris! However, they are not the only good, solid writers in existence. The professor of that class claimed he'd just picked writers he admired and who he thought exemplified the class' objective--creative journalism, essentially--and I thought, how unfortunate. How unfortunate that the only people who have shaped your art are ones who look and sound exactly like you.

I could go on about the issues surrounding race and class in the creative arts, but I won't. Instead I have to go back to my real job, so I can pay my very real rent and buy my real groceries.